Members of the Washington Township Board of Education listen to Superintendent Bob Goldschmidt's budget presentation in 2012. File photo by Michelle Caffrey

With looming budget difficulties and a steadily declining enrollment, the Washington Township School District is once again looking at redistricting as an inevitable occurrence — just not yet.

It certainly won’t happen by the start of the new school year in September, Superintendent Robert Goldschmidt said. And redistricting, or redrawing residential boundary lines for each individual school’s sending district, certainly wouldn’t include selling off or closing any of the district’s schools.

“It’s been on the radar, but there is not an immediate or imminent plan to redistrict,” Goldschmidt said, adding that in the future, however, it’s inevitable. “There is an understanding among the board and administration that we are going to have to do it.”

Enrollment in the district has been steadily declining for years, down from its peak of nearly 10,000 students to about 8,100 today.

The possibility of closing a school has been brought up, most recently by Board Member Steve Altamuro at the last board meeting.

“At some point, with the population continuing to decline, it just doesn’t justify having the number of buildings we have,” Altamuro said in January. “It just doesn’t make sense.”

Goldschmidt, however, said there are no plans to do so, and that closing a school, without a notion of what future populations or enrollments will look like, would be a mistake.

“We’re not closing any school,” Goldschmidt said. “There’s a great danger, in a district this size, in closing or selling or abandoning a school facility because it only takes a couple of years for population trends to change, and when that happens, if you’ve given up on a facility, do you go back to the voters and ask to build a new one? We’d rather not be in that position.”

In 2011, a board-commissioned, 87-member Redistricting Task Force ultimately determined that a redistricting scenario that called for the closure of a school would’ve caused more problems than it solved and only save about 1 percent of the budget.

Instead, Goldschmidt said any redistricting plan would focus on optimizing the district’s facilities and keeping transportation as efficient and fair as possible.

When redistricting was brought up by past administrations, the imbalance in some school populations — as well as incidents of students in newer developments being sent to schools farther away from home if local schools were at capacity — were cited as problems that need to be addressed.

“It’s important we make sure we’re utilizing our facilities as efficiently as we can,” Goldschmidt said. “As enrollment has gone down, whether it’s the use of technology or providing special education programs at home, we’ve expanded the need for classroom space. I’m not saying we need more space ... but the needs have changed and the population has changed.”

Goldschmidt stressed that any discussion about redistricting in the future would be done openly, with plenty of chances for public conversations, comments and input.

“Redistricting is something we will have to do,” he said. “But it will not be behind closed doors.”